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Long time no blogging, right? Here is the new stuff. I am writing in the conference room at Goldman Sachs Private Internet Conference at Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.

I just finished a great talk with Tom Lantzsch, from ARM. It was a 1:1 – that type of session you register and spend about 30 minutes with people you want to meet alone. I regret a little bit to request that session when it is approaching because I suddenly realized that I don’t have any intersection between my business and chip design business, and I worried that it may end up with nothing essential and waste both party’s time, and it turned out to be exactly the opposite. Here is a brief note about what we can learn from ARM.

1. Long Term

ARM is a 22 year company. In its first 20 years, 20 billion chips was using ARM architect, and they got 6 billion on the 19th years, and about 10 billion after that. It was then ARM become widely known. They charge license fee, and royalty fee, and in the first many many years, they only run the company to be covered by the immediate license fee. Royalty fee is the big part (0.07 USD per chip) but that came much later. This is not common even in semi-conductor field, and their success is really postponed by focusing on long term.

2. Keep Small

ARM is a 17 billion USD company now. However, it only has 2000 full time employees. They intentionally keep the company small.

3. Run it Cheaply.

ARM is about cheap. They build a culture of cost. As executive committee members, Tom still travels on economic class, and most of ARM’s clients sitting in the section before in flights. Although it does not impact the company financially for CEO to fly business, it does affect the culture. We talked about Google, and talked about the expansion in people, and the luxurious travel package. We all agreed that it is one way road, and cannot come back. ARM charges 0.07 USD per chip (this includes the more expensive chips), and that is the core of its business.

4. Run it Different.

ARM is not a design firm. They feel lucky that several of their principles worked so well in the last 20 years. Thanks to the slow advancement of battery technology, ARM’s core competence around low power consumption chips are stronger over time. I assumed a senario that battery life goes 10x, whatever ARM does not matter that much. Tom agreed.

ARM is also about partnership. Since they don’t design chips, they set standard, and create the architect, so they have few thousand partners, and they used that as a big network effect component: More partners on the equipment side, the more partners on the chip designer side. They played it in a really big and long term way.

Inspiration for me

I was impressed. Many great companies share some common ground. That is very different from the majority. “Luke 13:24: Strive to enter the strait gate”. Follow what most companies are doing and suggesting, and you are doomed.

By talking with great leaders, I can understand how to keep the peace inside, and keep doing what we believe to be true.

After switching to WordPress from MovableType, and after switching from Windows to Mac, I need to find some software to blog on my laptop. Here is MarsEdit. I saw some good comments from Quora on it, and here you are. This is the first post from the client.

Mr. Systrom, now 29, offered this as a parable for the roomful of would-be entrepreneurs who came to hear him talk at Stanford last spring: in the intensely competitive start-up scene here, success is as much about who you know as what you know. “Make sure to spend some time after the talk getting to know the people around you,” he told his audience.

He is right in both China and US. But in the valley, although people provide connections, most people provide knowledge and advice, just as Adam D’Anglo did for Instagram, but in China, people generally expect resources.

I took a lot of photos with people I met, and many of them are good friends, but I never spent the time to organize them in a good way. Here is my attempt to make it happen.

Sanjeev Singh and Jian Shuo Wang. January 18, 2012 at Facebook Office in Melon Park, CA. Sanjeev was creator of Google Mail, and FriendFeed.com. I visited Sanjeev in Facebook after FriendFeed.com was acquired by Facebook, and had wonderful lunch together in the newly opened cafe.

Jack Ma, President of Alibaba.com. September 30, 2011 at Stanford University, CA. We attended China 2.0 Conference by Stanford University and Jack delivered closing speech after my pannel. We met briefly at the backstage.

Paul Halen, former China Director of National Security Council of White House. Taken in Oct 29, 2011 in Xi’an when we went to Karaoke together.

Jan Berris, VP of National Committee on US-CHina Relationships (NCUSCR). Taken on December 1, 2007 in Nanjing during the Young Leader’s Forum. Jan participated US-China relationship building from leading the US Ping-Pong team to visit China in 1971, and brought Jet Li to US.

Zhu Tong and Jian Shuo. November 2007 in Nanjing, China. Rose Zhu served as interpreter of Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin.

With Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, and currently CEO of HP. Taken on March 28, 2005 in Shanghai, China. Worked with Meg for about two months in Shanghai during the summer of 2005.

Photo with Prof. Tan when I delivered speech on September 21, 2010 at Computer Department, National University of Singapore.

With Zhang Jie, president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University on October 3, 2011, in San Jose, CA.

Group photo of few day gathering Young Leaders Forum gathering in 2007. Among them are Christopher Cassidy, astronaut of NASA and visited space station; Matt Isler, Colonel of USA Air Force with a squadron of F-15C airplane. etc…

I am trying to collect a list of interesting media that is raising these years, and it is very different from the last generation. It is typically created by an experienced media industry person, but jumped out of the old framework. Here is the starting and I will keep updating the list.

The Founder by former Chief Editor of China Entrepreneur editor Niu Wenwen

Starting from Sept 11, 2002, with my first blog, I have been blogging for ten years. I cannot believe it! Ten year doing one thing everyday seems crazy for anyone, and I am surprised I am that crazy guy.

However, the bad news is, I realized that I am not as calm and as peaceful as 10 years ago. With the increase of age, and increase of responsibility, it is harder and harder to sit down at the desk, and write something. Email flys in; mobile rings; Weibo checking; Yifan calls…. More importantly, within my mind, thousands of things flying to different directions. I heard something this morning: with the increase of age, especially after 35, there are too many distraction that few can stay calm and concentrated. It needs a lot meditation and understanding of what is important than the younger time. I believe I may entered another stage of life after 10 years of blogging. Look at the frequency, topic, and depth of the blog entries I wrote in the last three years, and I can clearly see the path of the declination in frequency, decrease in interestingness, and decrease in depth. I am full aware of it, and I know it is the competition of attention for me. The competition just get stronger when I am connected to more, and it is the time to cut something from my life.

Look at the simple life of Yifan, and I know days are long for him. There are a lot I can learn from Yifan – to keep focused and keep doing the important things.

I created my first plugin when I created my CEO Blog. The problem is obvious: I am going to have a CEO blog where I can share my thoughts with the team frequently. I tried to write a different blog, and I found it is just impossible to maintain two. So I decided to put it on to my own personal blog.

Although most of the articles are public in nature, I do have something that I hope to disclose to the general public later. I don’t want to have complicated OAuth based verification. A simple IP based restriction is good enough. There is no simple solution so I wrote one myself.

You can download it, modify it, and do whatever you want. There are many hard code in the system – I never blame developers for doing dirty hacks when the time is limited, but we do need to polish it from time to time.

I promise to add all the hard code to options, and create an admin panel for it, in the next version.

I am back from Hangzhou, and I would say, I will never drive to Hangzhou again.

Hangzhou is only 45 minutes away via high-speed rail, and the transportation to and back the railway station is so simple for me, and the only bottle neck is to get to hotel from the Hangzhou railway station. It takes for ever to build the metro in Hangzhou. Despite that, I should enjoy the relaxed time in Hangzhou via taxi, or local cars, not driving. I am very tired after the long trip.

For some reason, I enjoy learning languages, no matter it is the language of daily life sense, or computer sense.

I can read and write in:

Chinese

English

C/C++

Java (a little bit)

JavaScript (Not to compare it with Hax)

PHP

ASP/VB/VBScript

C#

Propositional Logic

Mathematics

I am looking forward to learn more. Some language I started a little bit (but I put some serious effort behind) are:

Italian

German

Python

Perl

Lisp

Objective C

Japanese

I found how hard it is to maintain two blogs at the same time, one in English, and the other in Chinese. I found I tend to write in Chinese for long enough before switching to English, and vice versa. It is the same in programing languages. To switch from PHP to Python really took me some time these days.

Language is an expression of thoughts. But it cannot be separated from thoughts. I realized when I think of issues in startup, and technology world, I tend to use English in my mind, and when I think of feelings, mathematics, and local matters, of cause my preferred language is Chinese. When I write anything related with web, PHP is still by far the most natural choice for me, but for algorithm, I still prefer C (not even C++). I never liked Java. Never.

Because I swing between languages in daily life, I started to observe the impact of language on my thoughts. Some very long sentences can be easily constructed in English, but not in Chinese. But the spirit of many things can be so concise and precious in Chinese. I just like to use them interchangeably. I also use many English word in my Chinese, just like HTML inside PHP. Because there are many definition and history origins for certain word. For example, Hacker is a well defined world in startup world in English (I mean startup world, and the word hacker sounds scary for normal people who speaks English), but the 黑客 does not translate. I have to stick to that word, even in Chinese.

I hope I can continue to learn more language (Did I mention that I got 900 in the entrance exam for universities in 1995? The score range from 100 to 900). I learn

(sort (1, 4, 2, 3) #'<)

in LISP, and I feel I am a better CEO today when I talk with Joanna. I said:

A company is a sort function, and you have to decide what the second parameter is.

This is pretty simple: the post code of the area I am moving around. I love the idea of postal code, but the way it is presented in China is not so up-to-date. The postal code of US seems more interesting, for example, 94301, or Singapore, where they assign a post code for every building.

5. Other random numbers

The more universal numbers are most interesting for me. For example, the ISBN numbers (isbn:0375420827 for the Art of travel), the mobile phone numbers (13916146826 for me), or even PNR.

Why I am so interested in these numbers? I am still puzzled and don’t have an answer. Maybe that is the inborn instinct of an engineer?

These lines of response from Elastic Search at http://localhost:9200 seems so nice. I smiled when I saw this response, and I said to my self: “Hack! Those guys at elastic search really solved a problem.

They defined a problem in their statements, and they solved the problem. Doing a lot of things should be easier and easier – that is the thoughts of typical hacker. Why should I even need to download something to my server to run search? I may further ask the question. I believe some hacker out there will solve this problem.

You know, for Search

So, we build a web site or an application and want to add search to it, and then it hits us: getting search working is hard. We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that isbuilt for the cloud.

“This should be easier”, we declared, “and cool, bonsai cool”.

elasticsearch aims to solve all these problems and more. It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Apache Lucene.

Company

Any company started with an observed problem in this world, and people in the company get excited about solving that problem. If they solve that problem, they created something people want, just like those guys created elastic search, which is what I and Xiaopai wanted.

If you create something people want, you are likely to be fine. People will take care of the monetization problems and others easier than creating something people want. I saw a good model in Elastic Search.

Value of Technology

New ways of doing things, like elastic search takes JSON as input and output, and adapted schema free, and NOSQL type of approach is new way to do search, and that works very well for me.

It is the technology that makes this world better (well, among many other great things), and I am happy to be still back to the technology world.